In accordance with miniaturization of electronic devices or high densification of magnetic recording, there are required technologies of investigating structures or properties of more microscopic areas.
In recent years, as a local analytical technology at an atom level, an atom probe electric field ion microscope apparatus (hereinafter simply referred to as “the AP apparatus”) has attracted attention. The AP apparatus applies a high voltage of an order of several kV to 10 kV to a sample shaped in the form of a needle, to cause field evaporation of atoms themselves in a tip portion of the sample by a high electric field generated at the tip, and then performs mass spectrometry of ions generated by the field evaporation to investigate a structure of the tip portion of the sample.
In recent years, a technology called as an atom probe tomography (APT) has appeared due to improvement of a detector portion. The ATP can simultaneously measure positions and species of atoms of a sample tip, and hence, the structure of the sample tip can three-dimensionally be reconstituted with an atomic resolution. In this point, this kind of probe has features which are not seen in other local analytical apparatuses, thus attracting attention.
On the other hand, there is also an apparatus which irradiates the sample with an electron beam to detect a secondary electron or a transmission electron, thereby inspecting a fine structure of the sample. An example of the apparatus which detects the secondary electron is a scanning electron microscope (SEM), and examples of the apparatus which detects the transmission electron include a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM).
For dimension measurement of a high accuracy of 1 nm level which is required for element miniaturization, the SEM is poor in a spatial resolution. The TEM and STEM employ a transmitting method and therefore have a higher resolution than the SEM, and hence, these microscopes have been used in a case where the finer and more accurate dimension measurement is required.
Thus, there begins to be required a technology of further improving an analysis accuracy by a composite analysis in which an analysis by the AP apparatus and an analysis by the TEM or the like using the electron beam are combined.
When such a composite analysis is performed, the same observation area has to be found from respective data.
However, for example, in the case of observation of a grain boundary having a size of 10 nm or less, all crystal grains have the same shape and size, and hence, there is the problem that it is difficult to specify the crystal grain which is being observed.